Chinese AI Model Narrows Gap with Anthropic and OpenAI

A Chinese startup has placed its latest artificial intelligence model fourth on one of the industry’s most respected intelligence rankings, while charging a fraction of what Anthropic or OpenAI demand for comparable performance.

GLM-5.2, launched last month by Beijing-based Z.ai, has captured Silicon Valley’s attention for its coding and agentic capabilities, which approach the leading American systems. This has drawn comparisons to DeepSeek’s disruptive market debut in 2025.

According to Artificial Analysis, GLM-5.2 achieves a score of 51 on the firm’s Intelligence Index v4.1, landing fourth overall and first among all open-weight models. It surpasses MiniMax-M3, DeepSeek V4 Pro, and Kimi K2.6. On Code Arena’s front-end coding leaderboard, the model’s Max tier holds second place, ahead of Anthropic’s Claude Opus variants.

The pricing has unsettled rivals. Z.ai charges $1.40 per million input tokens and $4.40 per million output tokens on its first-party API, with third-party hosts offering even lower rates. Multiple outlets estimate this is between a fifth and a seventh of what Claude Opus or GPT-5.5 cost per output token, though the exact ratio varies by provider and tier. Regardless, it undercuts the closed American frontier by a wide margin.

David Sacks, who served as the White House’s AI czar under Donald Trump before returning to the private sector, stated that the model is “as good as the currently available models from OpenAI and Anthropic.” He described it as sitting just below Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 and roughly level with OpenAI’s GPT-5.5. This is a striking claim from someone who, weeks earlier, estimated the US lead over Chinese labs at six to nine months rather than conceding rough parity.

Beyond the headline intelligence score, GLM-5.2 tops Artificial Analysis’s GDPval-AA v2 metric, which measures real-world agentic work rather than abstract reasoning puzzles. It scores 1,524, ahead of MiniMax-M3 and DeepSeek V4 Pro, and close enough to GPT-5.5 on its highest reasoning setting that the two are effectively tied.

Analysts have flagged one trade-off: the model uses noticeably more output tokens per task than its open-weight peers, which eats into some of its cost advantage in practice, even as the sticker price stays comparatively low.

GLM-5.2 also arrives with a detail that matters more than benchmark scores: it was trained and runs on domestic Chinese silicon, reportedly a cluster of roughly 100,000 Huawei Ascend 910B processors, without Nvidia, AMD, or Intel hardware at any stage. This directly addresses Washington’s chip restrictions, which have aimed to slow Chinese AI progress by cutting off access to the most advanced processors.

The model’s weights are released under an unrestricted MIT license, meaning any company can download, modify, and run it locally for the cost of electricity alone.

The timing has helped Z.ai’s case. Washington’s order forcing Anthropic to suspend Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for foreign users, combined with the Trump administration’s request that OpenAI stagger the rollout of its own next model, has left a gap in the market that a free, capable, downloadable alternative is well placed to fill.

This backdrop sits inside the broader story of tightening US export controls on advanced chips, which Chinese labs have spent the past two years working around rather than waiting out.

Z.ai’s listed entity has felt the effect directly. Shares in the Hong Kong-listed company have risen sharply since its stock market debut in January, with trading spikes around GLM-5.2’s release pushing the stock up several multiples over its IPO price. A successor model, GLM-5.5, is expected in August, though Z.ai has not confirmed a firm date.